Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/44

 prosecution of witches, the standpoint of Christian authority, whose professors justly and logically regarded sorcery as being in essence heresy, to be suppressed by the same measures, to be punished with the same penalties.

In connexion with the close correlation between Witchcraft and heresy there is a very remarkable fact, the significance of which has—so far as I am aware—never been noted. The full fury of prosecution burst over England during the first half of the seventeenth century, that is to say, shortly after the era of a great religious upheaval, when the work of rehabilitation and recovery so nobly initiated by Queen Mary I had been wrecked owing to the pride, lust, and baseness of her sister. In Scotland, envenomed to the core with the poison of Calvin and Knox, fire and cord were seldom at rest. It is clear that heresy had brought Witchcraft swiftly in its train. Ireland has ever been singularly free from Witchcraft prosecutions, and with the rarest exceptions—chiefly, if not solely, the famous Dame Alice Kyteler case of 1324—the few trials recorded are of the seventeenth century and engineered by the Protestant party. The reason for this exemption is plain. Until the stranger forced his way into Ireland, heresy had no foothold there. That the Irish firmly believed in witches, we know, but the Devil’s claws were finely clipped.

In 1022 a number of Manichees were burned alive by order of Robert I. They had been condemned by a Synod at Orleans and refused to recant their errors. A contemporary document clearly identifies them with witches, worshippers of the Demon, who appeared to them under the form of an animal. Other abominable rites are fully set forth, comparable to the pages of Sprenger, Bodin, Boguet, De Lancre, Guazzo, and the rest. The account runs as follows: “Before we proceed to other details I will at some length inform those who are as yet ignorant of these matters, how that food which they call Food from Heaven is made and provided. On certain nights of the year they all meet together in an appointed house, each one of them carrying a lantern in his hand. They then begin to sing the names of various demons, as though they were chanting a litany, until suddenly they perceive that the Devil has appeared in the midst of them in the shape of some animal or other. As he would seem to be